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156 a "dragonade" last as that of Bar-soma has done? It cannot be doubted that the mass of Assyrian Christians were "Dyophysite" to the core, and were perfectly willing to separate from those who held the doctrine of "one Nature."

Their reasons for wishing to separate, however, were not purely doctrinal. That, as we have stated, we hold to have been the case nowhere; even though the oriental has an appetite for abstract theology and philosophical disputation that the Western cannot appreciate. The spirit of nationality, too, had probably less to do with it in their case than in that of others, for their full ecclesiastical independence was won already. The cause was something more mundane, but very natural all the same. For about one hundred and fifty years now they had been always under the shadow, and frequently under the edge of the sword of persecution; and this persecution had been never separate from the feeling "Rome is Christian, therefore no Christian can be loyal." A Persian war with Rome and a persecution of the Assyrian Church had usually gone together, and the answer to the question "which caused which?" had made little difference to the persecuted.

Their faith was a thing they could not and would not give up; but when already estranged from the Westerns by the theological quarrel, was it wonderful that, weary of suffering, they should say, "Let us at all events do something to show that we are a different brand of Christians to the Roman, and so need not be persecuted every time the Emperor and the Shah-in-Shah have a quarrel."

Bar-Hebræus also informs us that a motive force in the matter was the desire for legalized marriage among the clergy and bishops (though marriage is not the word that the historian employs). That this was so, particularly in the light of the fact